John Zerzan to Speak at Sierra College

Anarchism and primitivism are not compatible. Anarchists are pro-human and pro-ecology.

Primitivists have a very primitive understanding of ecology. The biosphere of this planet simply wont support six billion people living like primitivists. It lacks the carrying capacity. For the primitivist vision to be actualized, nearly six billion people would have to die first. That’s not anarchism. It’s more like Nazism.

two left thumbs

Anarcho- being a prefix to deisgnate a system of societal organization without authoritarian hierarchies.

(An - without)
(Archos- rulers)

one very much can be a primitivist who believes in having no rulers, although true, this is different than "Anarchism" as defined by political theorists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin etc..

note i did not call Zerzan an Anarchist.

however, your holier than thou (i'm real, you're not) attitude demonstrates a non-cooperative ethic with superiority overtones, and dripping with authoritarian subtext.

Thank you for the hypocrisy.

love
-Fritts

Your powerfully manipulative equation of primitivism to nazism shows not only an extrodinarily limited understanding of nazism (for national socialism has nothing to do with anarcho-primitivism) , but also a willingness to misrepresent factual information in order to suit your own needs.

Coercive much?

Anyone can call themselves "a REAL anarchist"
that doesn't make it true


love
-Fritts
a REAL martian

How's Z-star getting there? Is Wilma, Betty or Barney driving him? And I hope he doesn't take too many Ludes--or whatever shit he mellows out with--this time, as it's hard enough understanding his misanthropic dogma usually, but even worse when he's on downers.

It's sad, as he's a bright guy. Just read Knabb's "Public Secrets" to see how he used to denounce Knabb's groups, then would beg to be allowed to join; he could just never make up his mind. But I guess it wasn't easy being a union bureaucrat pimping people back then and he really didn't have time to think things through. And worse still, is his relationship with a sick, hateful pig like Kaczynski. I guess they have hating themselves--and humanity by extension--in common.

As a great writer once said about Zerzan:

"I've seen the best mind of my generation destroyed by dogmatic madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the anglo-saxon streets at dawn looking for an angry quaalude,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient Luddite connection to the starry dynamo in the primitivism of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the vegan darkness of electric blanket flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating green anarchy
..."

The Z-star, a damn shame. An example of a clever mind ruined by erroneous analysis and banally stupid ideas.

F. Flinstone
Bedrock, CA

you on the other hand are an imberrassment to the anarchist mileu.

your grasp upon rigid ideologies of workerism, production, technophilia and progress, has only fueled and empowered empire and war on the earth and its inhabbitants. it will be your and the grotesque remains of leftisms demise.

you fight to protect power.
we confront and denounce power in every form.

we also act upon these critiques.
we refuse to be the martyred slaves of time.

i hope your sake that your armchair is comfortable.

the world could ONLY support six billion people living as primitivists! primitive people are the only ones to have actually lives in anarchist societies.

The biosphere of this planet simply wont support six billion people living AS WE ARE you fool!!
the world (earth) cannot support six billion people living in agrarian, industrial agriculture, or urban techno-industral societies (modern life) as well.

techno-industrial-agricultural society is the actualized and nearly globalized nazi death camp, killing off millions of people with cars, nurotoxins, carcinogens, pesticides, inumerable chemicals, modern "medicines" and the poison they call food.

agriculture has made dental decay, starvation, disease, the domination of wymen & nature are reality. not to mention the demening act geneticly enginering plants and animals involved in domestication and making food less avalible and less nutritious.

read about it at: http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk
http://www.blackandgreem.org
& http://www.primitivism.com

you, it seams, are the one with the "primitive" shallow undersanding of ecology and the bioshere.

enJOY

Your anti-human population, clearly taken straight from the erroneous ideas of Malthus, arguments sound straight out of the Third Reich. They were into going back to the land and back in history back to some mysterious past of *harmony* too. Sounds like you'll copy them, death camps for over-population and all. You don't have a *critique,* only a shallow, partially digested moral rant. Not that everything you say is wrong, it's just when you come anywhere near my 'hood and start burning my miserable apartment building or hurting any of the kids around here with your lame libertine free-sex for all arguments or liquidating *excess* population, you're not going to live to see your homicidal wet dreams come true.

Threatening to start killing people will not only make you and your moral crusaders a large target for the state, but the dispossessed, working and not, but meagerly surviving people like me won't allow your vanguard of death to get away with it. *Primitivists* won't look different than any other authoritarian system on a genocidal raid, deciding who and what will live and what is *power* and will die.

The Nazis pale----sorry for the bad pun-----in comparison.

Your Doctor

this is what you said:

<<we supported Teds attacks on those directly responsible of carring out the death trip that is the modern world. there we regular people that we put in harms way, but that was unavoidable. our highest priority is protecting life. you must understand this.>>

not much different than lieutenant calley saying about the massacre at mei lei that he had to destroy the village to save the village. or like trots about kronstadt saying *you can't make an omlette without breaking some eggs.* or al queda attacking US empire and a couple of thousands deaths being mere *collateral damage.* this people are just as quickly replaced and all you do is bring down police state repression on real revolutionaries. you can't anonymously *letter bomb* away a social relationship.

hey dumb fuck, with that attitude of callousness and vanguardist moralism, you ARE bringing on the genocidal extinction you decry so much. you are the assassin of malcolm x, of judi bari, of fred hampton, of lil' bobby hutton. those you and ted have and will execute----clearly a bourgeois and authoritarian idea if there ever was one----are victims of your primitivist STATE or anti-state or whatever you call your acting out in bourgeois morality. your eye-for-an-eye so-called justice is what the cops do everyday in jacking up folks in the 'hood. as stokely himself said:

KEEP YOUR FILTHY WHITE HANDS OFF OUR BEAUTIFUL BLACK CHILDREN

go off and help end over-population by taking yourself out first.

that sums it up.
you guys are kinda like vegan reich in a way,authoritarian vanguardist liquidation of the undersireables.anarcho-primitivists are liberators!like bush!super!

remeber,assualt rifles are techonolgy,have fun fighting with a slingshot.

--i am a native american by the way and actually we are all african-- read the other zerzan thread if you want to know about me and my life (which you probably dont)

it seems to me that your problem is with violence.

i dont think killing anyone is going to change much of anything. i agree "you can't anonymously *letter bomb* away a social relationship" the attacks ted made were protest, he didnt change anything; he brought awarness. teds murders were tiny compared to the daily masacure of modern society and its affects on those "not up to IT'S pace of progress" which if you have a job funding the american economy and or pay taxes of any kind are in fact perpetuation and responsible for many times more murders that ted.

i completely agree that the killing of anyone is a horrible event. i dont think per se that, "eggs need to be cracked to make an omlette" but i refuse to limit myself to non-violence or elevate humans above any other living thing.

the ELF has never made an attack upon people. we reject all that inforces and institutuionalizes power, domination and domestication; and kills wildness, chaos, autonomy, and face to face experience of one another.

in fact, i completly reject all abstractions / ideals / programs that are placed above life and the liberation of desire and autonomy. especially those of God, the State, Truth, morality, anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, science, anthropology, communism, freedom, democracy.

you said-
<all you do is bring down police state repression on real revolutionaries>

repression will happen if you are actually a threat to the system and its totality.

no one is saying we should go wipe out your neighborhood, or burn your appartments are you kidding? i fight in solidarity with your will for autonomy (control of your own life and your own community) although when you start talking about reforming power institutions and reclaiming means of production we part ways.

but jesus christ i am not saying you physically, your neighboor kids, or those still participating are the enemy (for we all are imersed with in it), you acceptance of such things is dangerous but rather it is industry, capital, technology, progress, and power in our crosshairs. our blows are applied to the foundations of power and its institutionalized manifestations, not people.

the metaphor i used earlier was bad, i ment to describe that those who ignorantly cling on to technological industrial civilization are killing themselves and trying to take everything with them pushing humans into extinction. i ment to get the idea accross that i will sheed tears for those who refuse to get off the sinking ship and are choosing to go down with it.

we humans are facing extiction, soil is the earths life blood, we cannot survive with out soil. it is being destroyed on a massive scale and is exponentially increasing, it will take a long time for it to rebound too long possibly for humans to survive. agriculture is unsustainable in any form, its intensities merely prolong the enevitable ecological collapse.

civilization is coming down, we need accellerate its demise so life can continue and make the transition less sever. we need to destroy power and not allow it to recycle. dependence on this machine is suicide. as anarchists we need to recognise the power relationship with nature and eachother inherent in civilization, agriculture, technology, specialization, industry, symbolic culture, and anthropocentrism (not only because ecological collapse threatens our lives and existance) but as anarchists we reject power/domination/domestication and the destruction of autonomy.

I/we defend life/wildness/autonomy and refuse to allow civilization and its technologically clad prisionors (power elites who claim to be driving this boat) to kill everything in its inevitable collapse.

i apoligize for my frustration and earlier misleading comments

enJOY

common point many point out:

our abstenance from technology and civilization will not end its devistation

also it is everywhere, it is inescapable and this is precisly the problem, the sysem is built to force us into dependance upon it, local autonomy and sustainablity is its antithesis.

it would be stupid to willingly handicap ourselves in our struggle; by any and all means neccessary my friend.

the avoildance of the extreamly detremental technologies are avoilded for mantal health and to lessen alienation from real experience.

this isnt some new set of moral laws we are trying to abide by or push on others. clasic of the left to try and force everyone into moral boxes of theory and action.

enJOY

"Cops, Dirty Harry, And Junious Poole"

by Hal Draper, KPFA January 27, 1972

I am going to talk about Dirty Harry and Junious Poole, and about your responsibility for both.

Dirty Harry, as you may have found out by now, is a well-made right-wing movie, virtually a Birchite propaganda film, made with the cooperation of the great liberal mayor of San Francisco and his great liberal Police Department. Harry, a San Francisco police detective, is a mad-dog sadist killer in plain clothes, with a badge, who hates people, blacks, browns, and himself (more or less in that order) and who is shown to be a great hero who rescues civilization from a crazy killer, who is also in plain clothes but minus a badge. This crazy – I mean the second crazy – is a pathological sniper who is likely to get YOU if you don’t watch out. And so the audience is set up to root for Dirty Harry as he denounces the Supreme Court decisions as soft on crime, and indicts the civilian bleeding-hearts who release an insane murderer to kill more people just because their civil-libertarian do-gooders. This enlightening film even shows you that this mad dog (I mean the sniper) gets himself beat up deliberately in order to accuse Dirty Harry of doing it – so who can believe any stories about police brutality now? The victim probably paid someone to get beat up himself ...

That’s the way it goes, and it sets you up to nod your head as the scriptwriter, on the basis of fraudulent claims of how the rad-libs tie the hands of the cops from protecting you and me – the scriptwriter shows how you need touch cops, free-shooting cops, violence-loving cops; in fact, he shows how you need mad-dog types on the police force in order to protect you against the mad dogs who are not on the police force.

That’s Dirty Harry. Now who is Junious Poole?

Last Monday, in San Francisco, Junious Poole, a black man who was high on liquor and benzedrine, and low on money and hope, took up a rifle in the street and leveled it at two random policemen who happened to be walking along, emptied its bullets at them in a blur of hatred of something, wounding both of them. What he told newspaper reporters reads like an imitative movie script of what a poor devil like him is supposed to say: “It all came down on me,” he said. “No income. My wife collecting welfare, two babies ... I felt disgusted with the whole world and the situation. You can be a fool for so long, man, and then you just begin to see it in front of you,” he said.

Well, this poor casualty of society, who had been a fool for so long: what did he begin to see in front of him? Here’s what he also said: “I saw all the background that I have been told when I saw these two policemen walking down the street.” That’s Poole, verbatim.

What was “all the background” he had been told – what did he see when he saw these two policemen walking down the street? He saw the signs scrawled on walls: “Off the pig!” and similar enlightening political messages about making the revolution in the streets, and picking up the gun to Get the Man. That on the one side. On the other side, he saw all the Dirty Harries in uniform who had roughed up and beaten up blacks in the ghetto areas.

And what did the two policemen see? They saw that Dirty Harry was right: give it to ’em before they give it to you – knee in the groin, bullet in the head, get tough because your life is on the line.

So Dirty Harry produces Junious Poole; and Junious Poole produces more Dirty Harries; and you have a fine old war between the Cops and the Crazies, the Crazies and the Cops – till you can’t tell who’s the cop and who’s the crazy, and moreover it hardly matters.

Now my target in all this is neither Dirty Harry nor Junious Poole. I have no wish to spend any time turning cops into vegetarians or flower children or mourning over their lost souls. I was brought up in a Marxist movement where it was an axiom that a man in this society who put a policeman’s uniform on him and took his club in hand was, until evidence to the contrary, nothing but scum. But, by the same token, I learned a very long time ago not to confuse the ruling powers of society with the scum in their employ.

My target is also not the poor fool, aching with his miseries, who picked up the rifle and might just as well have shot himself in the head as those policemen. My target is the people who told him “all that background.” I refer to the self-styled radicals who, for some years now, have been burbling over with their rhetoric about “offing the pig,” and “picking up the gun,” and “revolution in the streets,” and “urban guerrillas,” and cheering every time somebody else bombs the window of a Bank of America branch, or terrorizes a PG&E power line, or incubates a revolution in a safety-deposit vault, or otherwise takes direct action in terrorism according to the most fashionable doctrines of 1890. Because it has been these bumpkin-blowhards of the Big Bang theory of revolution who have been very successful not in tearing apart the System, but in tearing apart what there was of a radical movement that was aborning.

In the whole history of movements of social dissent, in this or any other country, I doubt whether there was ever an emptier and more self-defeating theory of revolutionary action than this trend in our recent years which made “offing the pig” its main slogan, and orated about making the “revolution in the streets.” Of course, the two come down to the same thing, because if you sally out into the streets to make the revolution, it’s the pigs you’re going to meet. You are not going to run into the Board of Directors of General Motors in this your chosen battlefield, nor into the Cabinet, nor even the office boys of the Powers That Be: the enemy you meet “in the streets” is the hired scum, that’s all. And the cream of the jest is that, for every cop that is killed by some self-styled revolutionary bravo, not a hair is mussed on the head of the ruling class, who have a right to laugh themselves to death over these pseudo-revolutionary antics while, in public, they make a horrified outcry about the crimes of the subversives.

It should be understood that the police are the paravanes of the capitalist state power. That implies a comparison with (say) a minesweeper. It is in mined waters, and any direct contact with a mine will blow a hole in its side. Its whole strategy, therefore, is to avoid any direct contact, but to interpose its own buffers – one or more layers of buffers – which any explosive force has to get through before it can even confront the real core of power. The minesweeper’s paravanes are most useful the further they are removed from the real center that has to be defended. A paravane makes contact with an explosive mine, and it is blown up: the paravane is destroyed, but the ship itself is safe because it has been destroyed.

The police act as the paravanes of the system. They are there, way out in the open, as the first contact with potentially explosive social material. If a cop is killed, or merely attacked, the state power makes a big hue and cry, and can draw a long breath of relief. It can use the incident for arousing public opinion against dissenters; it can use it for escalating repression; it can use it for deepening reaction; and in exchange, all it pays is a pension to the cop’s widow, if that. But not a hair on its own head is hurt. The transaction is so beautifully cheap, for the state, that it could not be better if it had been planned by itself; and you never know whether it was or not. There is a big misunderstanding about the question of telling the difference between police provocateurs and plants, on the one hand, and sincere if stupid Weatherman types, on the other. The misunderstanding is this: that it makes much difference whether you can tell them apart. In the history of terrorism, some waves of reaction have been launched by governments which produced a terroristic incident to order, and some by governments that simply waited for some obliging chucklehead to do it for them. And in some cases, to this day it has not been possible to determine which was which.

I remember vividly an interview that TV newsman Mike Wallace (I think it was he) held with Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, the first interview he gave after fleeing there, I think. It was broadcast after the first wave of police assaults on the Black Panthers, and, if I’m not mistaken, at the time Huey Newton’s life was hanging in the balance in the courts. In the midst of this lynch atmosphere, which was based on the proposition that the Panthers were nothing but terroristic assassins, Cleaver calmly told his interviewer that sure, it would be a good idea if President Nixon were assassinated.

Now, could Cleaver have done any better to help the lynch movement against the Panthers if he had been paid to do his stuff by the FBI? As it happens, I have no doubts about Cleaver’s sincerity in this case; this political ignoramus and half-baked Theoretician of the Absurd has been a disaster for the Panthers just as he was a disaster for the Peace and Freedom Party, which he knifed in the back after being named its presidential candidate. A police spy would probably be cleverer. But what difference does it make whether the FBI gets his help free or on salary, as this great revolutionary Thinker keeps on sending his advice, from Algeria, on how the radical movement here can get its head chopped off?

This whole movement of sick-radicalism, as represented by these terroristic elements or Weatherman types, counts on something to puff it up from the nullity it really is. They count on you. That is, they count on their mischievous antics meeting with a certain amount of unspoken sympathy from the liberal and radical public, because their intentions are so good, or because they are regarded as being real free-wheeling revolutionaries. That is pure bull-bleep. These elements have nothing in common with a serious revolutionary movement. These types are really middle-class liberals in a frenzy. In fact, some of them act this out by alternating between supporting Democratic Party left-fakers on the one hand and writing articles, on the other, about the chemistry of pipe bombs.

A long time ago, my friend Karl Marx had their number. In 1850 he wrote a review of a couple of books by French police spies on the conspiratorial secret societies of the day – the Weathermen of the day. In this piece, Marx took them down and shook them out as never before. Here are a couple of sentence from Marx’s review, for example:

“Their job indeed consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, pushing it artificially into crises, making a revolution on the spur of the moment without the conditions for a revolution. For them the only condition for the revolution is a sufficient organization of their conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution, and wholly share the confusion of ideas and the limitation to fixed notions of the old alchemists. They go eagerly for invented devices to achieve the revolutionary miracle: incendiary bombs, explosive contraptions with magical powers, riots, whose effects are sure to be all the more miraculous and awesome the less they have any rational basis. Busy with such plot-mongering, they have no other aim than the next overthrow of the existing government, and look with deepest disdain on a more theoretical clarification of the workers as to their class interests.”

So much for Karl Marx. But of course Marx is out of date for these bomb-bumblers, whose theories were mildewed with age before Marx was born. These theories, now dressed up with new terms like “urban guerrillaism” or others, have always been the rediscoveries of people overcome by their own impotence, frustrated by their own lack of any really revolutionary perspective, giving out with their last shriek of liberal rage just before going back to “make it” inside the system or to back the latest capitalist politician who uses the latest phrases of the left. Above all, as Marx already said, they have the deepest disdain for the tasks of theoretical education and long-term class-struggle organization of the mass of working people in this country, who in turn have the deepest contempt for them, and rightly so.

Leave these types to their games of Cops and Crazies. That is not the way.

after Harry has quit the police force in disgust (at the end of the first movie) a group of cops seek to emulate him by forming a vigilante hit squad. They’re the bad guys. Harry winds up hunting them down. That’s the plot. Great movie. Lots of cops die. Check it out.

But if you really like watching cops die on screen, check out a B-movie classic called Assault on Precinct 13. The plot is really, really simple. The acting sucks bigtime. But cops die right and left. I saw it at a matinee at a cheapo theater on Market Street, when it came out. The audience was almost entirely high school kids cutting class. They whooped and hollered every time a cop died. At one point, one of the characters asked, “Why would anyone want to kill cops?” The entire audience cracked up.

"time for revolution has come...off the pigs...time to pick up the gun...off the pigs"--old panther spiritual.
this idea of armed struggle goes far beyond this day and age.
panthers did it,so did most revolutions that suceeded...ezln,checnya,vietnam,russia,china,the american revolution,france,spain...must i go on?
when you refer to people cheering when a b of a window is smashed and you call it terrorism,it sound like you lack in the area of knowledge of what terrorism is,it is violence against the civilian populace to gain a religious or political goal.attacking a inatimate object that does not feel and is a physical representation of capitalism .ELF and ALF do not attack civilian,so they cannot be considered terrorists,just guerillas.
if your a marxist then you believe that will be an envitible point where the burgeosise and proletriat will apex and one will emerge victorious,so do you think that the burgeosise will easily give up all and not go fighting tooth and nail?be real.do you think that they will not kill us and ours while we sleep?
"a well armed populace is the best defense against tyranny"
-soy

is breaking a b of a window really revolutionary? since when?

what is it to the poor working class people inside who either can't find another job or don't have a computer to do home banking? are the plate glass shards raining down on their domes revolutionary? and just how is it that merely breaking out some windows---or gluing some locks for that matter--revolutionary?

makes the orthodox idealismm sound good in caparison...i guess we'd have to break a helluva lot of windows for the urban guerilla determinism to work. how does it work: do you just break a *critical mass* of glass and then the social relatioins of capital collapse and the state withers away? sounds like a boring and unrealistic fantasy. oh, i forgot: you'll pick up guns and kill all the cops too. sounds like dumb forms with absolutely NO content to your critique and equally lacking in your program. just break and kill....and *voila*---revolution drops in your lap.

again, makes the marxian determinism sound somehow *grown up* and serious in camparison. but that's just my opinion. what's your opinion---besides the catechism of broken glass and dead cops being *good.* do you people really think before you post things? doesn't seem like it.

tommy

on a sidenote, there are a heck of a lot of working class people who don't even use the banking system. I have two housemates over age 35 who have 40 hr a week jobs, one unionized, who don't use banks. They go to those check cashing stores to make out money orders if they need a check.
http://www.frbatlanta.org/invoke.cfm?objectid=DC6ADC02-8061-11D5-897D00609459DBE6&method=display

It's a waste of time. They'd just hire new ones.

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould

"If I want to baste an Irishman, I can always find another Irishman to turn the spit." -- HRM George III

with enough money in the bank, the fee for cashing your paycheck with a bank account is negligible. with those rip-off check cashing places it's a fortune--relatively. isn't is 5-10%?

so your friend ends up being exploited by the millionaires rather than the billionaires. what kind of self-defeating morality is that? sounds dumb to me.

tommy

with enough money in the bank, the fee for cashing your paycheck with a bank account is negligible. with those rip-off check cashing places it's a fortune--relatively. isn't is 5-10%?

so your friend ends up being exploited by the millionaires rather than the billionaires. what kind of self-defeating morality is that? sounds dumb to me.

tommy

i never said breaking b of a windows is revolutionary,people have done it before and more than likely take it further.
revolution does just fall in to our laps,(R)evolution in the marxist concept takes place in some far off time,like the heaven of christianity. our (r)evolution takes place here and now with every interaction of everyday.if breaking windows of the local starbucks,and interaction of disgust with capitalism and that broken window(or series of)changes the relation of consumer and corperate then it is )r)evolutionary.
check out the situationists.we are in revolution every second,if your not,then your just a liberal.

no soy, you're some kind of gradualist social-democrat. the SI didn't ever say lame ass reformist crap like you----they had a biting, hegelian critique that took the best of marx, anarchism, nietzsche, dada, surrealism and applied all that to the possibilites of revolution coming from a critique of everyday life.

if revolution to you is gluing the locks of the local butcher shop or breaking some windows, you're just a liberal vandal who's politcs don't go beyond the lifestylism of being a preachy vegan moralist.

tom

Yeah, what you middle class crybabies need is to read LOTS of Nietzsche. Then all that *MORAL* lifestylism will go out the window. Real working people don't have any time for your moral complaints. Go back to the country club and tell mommy, but don't waste our time here.

Freddy